Belgian Amiga Club

Confession: I'm one of those guys that like to reinvent the wheel.
Because the wheel you have made yourself is always rounder than any other wheel in the world, right?

I also know that "reinventing the wheel" often is the result of 2 things

  • Or you don't know the existance of other wheels
  • Or you know they exist, but somehow they seem too heavy, or doesn't seem to fit.

So... After my little "button" class I decided to give existing Amiga GUI frameworks another chance, because I had the feeling I was trying to solve a problem that was solved at least a dozen times before.

The one Gui framework in the Amiga world that is impossible to miss is - of course - MUI: the Magical user interface.

And from a developer perspective, I now know why.
It is simply really really well made.

No wonder it's the default, and it's even supported out of the box on OS4 and Morphos.
So - unless you're targeting kickstart 1.3 - you would be a fool not to use it, right?

To use it as C developer, you need the C includes you can find here
All the examples includes are made to be compiled on Sas/C so - indeed - they work out of the box. How nice is that!?!

Very very very nice and super easy to use ... 
I still have this nagging aversion of "dependencies" in your software, but is there any OS3 user that doesn't have MUI installed? Don't think so...

Note to self: about those "includes" in C: is there any way to keep track of where they come from, maybe by putting them in seperate include folders?
Now I just copy the MUI include files to my main C include folder and it magically works (See what I did there? :-) ) but what If I want to compile my program in 10 years on a new system? how would I know what includes I need exactly?

Poking around the MUI example files I found something very striking ... the "KnobsControl" class.

On the left is the MUI knobs control class, on the right is the knob and number-display I made for BassoonTracker.
Isn't the resemblance striking, especially with those orange numbers in the rounded box?
I honestly can't remember seeing that MUI knob control anywhere before, so let's put this down to a case of "Great minds think alike" shall we? :-)

Written on 03/04/2021 by Steffest

This article is part of the Wanderings in Amiga dev-land blog